BSP to rally for polls earlier than usual

Lucknow: BSP chief Mayawati sounded the poll bugle on Sunday announcing a grand rally to be organised in Agra and Azamgarh on August 21 and 28, respectively. The announcement is sign of Mayawati hitting election ground much before expected, vis-a-vis UP assembly election due in 2017.
In 2012, Mayawati had kicked off her election campaign on her birthday on January 15, barely a month before the state went to polls.So was the case with 2007 when Mayawati started campaigning barely two months before polls.
UP elections are expected to be held any time after January next year. Given this, Mayawati will be kicking off her election campaign almost four to five months earlier than usual.
Mayawati, said more rallies will be organised in the next few months. "Title of all the rallies will be 'Sarvajan Hitaay Sarvajan Sukhay' (For welfare, happiness of all),'' the BSP chief said. Political experts said the motto speaks loud and clear of Mayawati's stance of social engineering wherein she would try to woo people from all castes.
The BSP supremo is learnt to be perceiving a fast changing political situation in poll-bound UP for quite some time.
Meanwhile, under attack of the opposition, essentially the Samajwadi Party, for having allied with the BJP in the past, BSP chief Mayawati claimed it was BJP and not her party which wanted to join hands. She cited the case of State guest house incident of June 1995 when she was allegedly attacked by SP workers after BSP withdrew its support from the SP resulting in face-off with the then Mulayam Singh Yadav government.